Word: pyongyang
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...Korea's Stalinist regime had consistently denied that it had anything to do with a series of disappearances in Japan two decades ago. No longer. In a stunning about-face, North Korean President Kim Jong Il confessed at a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi last week in Pyongyang that his country's spies had indeed abducted 13 Japanese citizens from 1977 to 1983. He blamed the kidnappings on special-forces agents "carried away by a reckless quest for glory," apologized for their actions and assured Koizumi that they had been punished. (Kim, according to most analysts...
During the Pyongyang summit, Japanese diplomat Kazuyoshi Umemoto met with Megumi's putative daughter and a man who introduced himself as Kaoru Hasuike, as well as with three other people who said they were abductees. Hasuike told Umemoto that he and Okudo now have two children and that he works in a research center in Pyongyang. He added that he's uncertain about returning home. The idea that anyone would voluntarily remain in North Korea--with its totalitarianism and poverty--has aroused suspicions in Japan...
...scratch. Private enterprise, not state socialism, will guide the economy. A legal code enforced by imported European judges, not Kim's fiats, will regulate the community. Most of the drab, dilapidated buildings that line Sinuiju's quiet streets will be flattened, modern offices and factories built in their place. Pyongyang has even appointed a non-Korean?39-year-old Chinese entrepreneur Yang Bin, reportedly the second-richest man in China?to govern the new zone. Li, after being told that his role in the grand experiment involves packing his things and leaving, says impassively: "We must obey the higher authority...
...years of extreme isolationism, Kim is letting go of the ideology of Juche?Self-Reliance?and easing toward economic and political engagement. The zone could prove to be another of North Korea's grandiose white elephants, like the 105-story, pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel that towers, unfinished, over the Pyongyang skyline. But if it works, new ideas and fresh money could spill over the city's whitewashed walls and cascade across the country's brainwashed citizens. "Once this succeeds," says a confident Yang, the new chief executive of the Sinuiju SAR, "the whole country may be open...
...creation of the zone capped a summer of surprising moves by Kim to air out his Hermit Kingdom and curry favor with old enemies. Two years after dialogue between North Korea and the U.S. broke down, the Bush administration last week agreed to send an envoy to Pyongyang for talks on its missile development program and tensions on the peninsula. In September, Kim apologized to Japan for abducting 13 Japanese citizens during a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi?the first time Pyongyang has ever acknowledged the kidnappings. Kim also resumed a delayed effort to connect a railway between...